Director Agustín Arteaga and the trustees of the Dallas Museum of Art are celebrating three new acquisitions of comparatively old art after more than a year in which contemporary art acquisitions have dominated.

This is good news, and it signals that the museum is looking at its whole collection, not simply that which covers the last half century.

The most important is a French 17th century painting by the short-lived master Jacques Blanchard (1600-1638), who, like most French painters of the period, learned his craft in Italy. What is noteworthy about Blanchard is that he went not only to Rome, where a large community of French artists lived, but to Venice, where he spent two years studying the paintings of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. He is known today as the "French Titian."

The large painting represents a mythological subject, the god Zeus descending from the heavens to pay an erotic visit to the beautiful — and totally nude — mortal Semele, who reaches up to acknowledge his advances. From the fire between them, we can surmise that their love will be short-lived.

The painting had been acquired without a secure attribution, but, while in conservation at the DMA, became accepted by scholars and connoisseurs as a rare work by Blanchard, joining a small number of important paintings by that master in U.S. museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Toledo Museum of Art, and, closer to home, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin.

It is a gift to the DMA from Thomas C. and Jeanne Campbell, who are among the rare collectors of Old Master paintings in North Texas.

The second noteworthy acquisition, a large double-sided drawing by Dutch modernist master Piet Mondrian is also a gift to the DMA from Ann Jacobus Folz. Although it is odd to highlight a drawing, this one is a critical addition to the DMA because it fits into the museum's internationally important holdings of the paintings and drawings of that master instigated by the late James H. and Lillian Clark and their family.

One side of the large sheet relates closely to an important painting of the same subject already in the DMA's collection (Mondrian's Farm Near Duivendrecht, in the Evening), while the second side is a real addition to the collection, which is comparatively weak in Mondrian's earliest abstract works. This one was inspired by the sea, a ubiquitous subject for the Dutch, and is dated by the museum to 1908. Fortunately, the DMA also owns a 1908-9 painting of a tree in a similar style.

The third gift from Folz is a 1909 painting on paper by Pierre Bonnard, an artist already represented in the DMA's collection. The Mondrian and the Bonnard are the first gifts of art from Folz, who has been a DMA member for nearly fifty years. Her late husband, A. Lorch Folz, was the final chairman of the Lorch Co., one of the largest and oldest makers of women's apparel in Texas.

Each of these gifts is a real addition to the museum's growing collection of European Painting before 1940. With two major endowment funds for 18th and 19th century European Art (The Mrs. John B. O'Hara Fund of the Foundation for the Arts) and for European Art before 1700 (The Marguerite and Robert Hoffman Fund), the museum is poised to enrich Dallas's historic collections, and these gifts give us hope that it will.

Rick Brettell is the founding director of the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art.